Mixdown - Happy Pills

My mixdown assignment was the first of my projects to be “completed”, or at least I thought it was…

I chose the song “Happy Pills” by the band Candlebox, which was recorded live at The Lab by Telefunken. I knew the band from their song “Far Behind” which was a big hit in the 90’s, and loving everything about 90’s alternative rock I knew I had to pick a song from them.

In the folder I downloaded, there were two guitar tracks, three bass tracks, three vocal tracks and ten drum tracks. After setting levels, I decided the left guitar track needed doubled, so I duplicated it and used the Time Adjuster plugin to thicken up the mix. The individual drum tracks only needed HPF’s, minor corrective EQ and level setting (I was very impressed). The bass tracks were recorded well, but the bass player was unfortunately not playing his best that day. This was hard to manage as he rarely played in the pocket and I had to mainly mix it in the low-end for the fundamental notes, but could not bring myself to put it higher in the mix. The vocals proved to be the biggest challenge of the entire project, as Kevin Martin is reaching an age where he has a hard time balancing “staying in key” and “vocal dynamics”. He had great control for the majority of the song, but some of the choruses knocked my socks off with how long he got. He also had a hard time staying in key, but after watching the video that shot of the session, I noticed that he couldn’t hear himself very well with the set up as kept adjusting (and I’m assuming it was his mix). That being said, I had to use two de-essers, two separate EQs, and a compressor in order to get his voice balanced properly. I give a lot of credit to the engineer at Telefunken that had to mix that performance for their video.